The concept of populism is a theoretical kaleidoscope which has been used indiscriminately for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Marine Le Pen, Alexis Tsipras and Viktor Orbán, even for Barack Obama, or for Margaret Thatcher in the past. It really offers a reassuring view of the world: in today’s confused times, where all that is solid melts into air (political traditions, identities, narratives), people are being led astray by demagogues thunderously ventilating their fears of the unknown. But populism is merely a political style that invests political programs and strategies. It is not an ideology or a worldview in itself. Let us not take the appearance for the essence, the symptom for the cause. [...]
It is precisely with the outsiders and losers that social democracy lost contact after its social-liberal adaptation to late capitalism – and now finds itself bitterly defeated in Italy, trapped in a standstill coalition with the preachers of Ordoliberalismus in Germany, suffering from the “Pasokification” effect all across Europe. A victim of its own triumph, it became too much of a mainstream and consensual political force. With its last moment of hegemony (Blair’s “Third Way” and Schroeder’s “Neue Mitte”), social democracy effected a full adaptation to post-Fordist capitalism but at the same time lost its chance to change the path of European integration. Instead it made its opponent’s agenda its own: never before had social democrats believed so implicitly in market self-regulation. When the crisis broke social democracy was unable to formulate a Euro-Keynesian solution, to escape from austerity or remedy the inequalities of trickle-down economics. But material security is the touchstone for progressive reformism, next to identity politics. For social democracy it is after all not so difficult to win the support of “globalised” liberal white-collar voters. What has been lost is the support of the world of labour, the young precarious workers, the people stuck in rusting ports and former industrial cities. [...]
The Left should therefore defend its fundamentals instead of deploring the supposedly irrational populist surge. And this is first and foremost the primacy of politics over economy, a core tenet of social-democratic tradition as Sheri Berman has eloquently indicated: political intervention and not a passive acceptance of the “global market forces”, a new social-democratic compromise between capital and labour without great sacrifices on the part of economic stability but in return for more protection for the outsiders. An updated combination of prosperity and equity is the key to reassert the progressive values against the “cultural backlash”. After all, material security is a prerequisite for both individual emancipation and an open and self-confident national identity, only this time beyond nation-state (which was the case in the Glorious Thirty) as reformism is possible only at a supranational, European and rather federalist level.
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